Books published by Dalkey Archive Press

Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11.

A middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He's made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.

A young lawyer sets out on a mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that's no longer his-and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

Following his anthologies Man + Dog (2009) and Man + Doctor (2012), Nick Wadley has, with our encouragement, compiled this collection of drawings around the theme of Man + Table.

For five years, Enn Padrik has postponed the investigation into the apparently religiously inspired suicides of his daughter and her friends at a commune near Viljandi, but now he can postpone it no longer. The search for truth spans two generations and narrates the changes in the wider world and Estonian society in particular.

Since 2010, this anthology has been an essential resource for readers, critics, and publishers interested in contemporary European literature. In this, the seventh installment of the series, Best European Fiction 2016 continues its commitment to uncovering the best prose writing happening on the continent

The writer-narrator of The Bulgarian Truck has hit upon a new technique for writing a novel, which he calls "a building site beneath the open sky," but he cannot persuade his more widely read wife, Marianne, a character from an earlier novel, that it is any good.

The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional.

On Wing, the first published work of fiction by the Slovak poet-philosopher Robert Gal, is a constellation of hundreds of aphorisms, dreams, anecdotes, and inquiries, all written in a restless, searching, "improvisational" prose whose techniques reflect those of Bernhard, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, not to mention the saxophonist and composer John Zorn, who makes a brief cameo as a character.

The narrator of this novel is Ballerina, a fifteen-year-old with the cognitive faculties of a child, and each of its fifteen chapters begins with her first wetting her bed and thereby greeting a new day. Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina's interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.

A forlorn traveler is taken in by three suffering orphans, who, in the midst of their pain, give him food and shelter. The first, orphaned by history, still mourns a father who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, never to return. The second, orphaned by pathology, has a rare disease, and is facing madness alone in a mountain chalet. The third, orphaned by philosophy, is a teenager who has decided to cut all ties with his parents.Never one to avoid challenging questions, in this poignant triptych Laroche examines the relationship between a writer and his words: suggesting that, perhaps, he is the orphan of his own work.

A bevy of mediocre writers are invited to a seminar aboard a specially chartered train, and this novel tracks their progress across Europe: bitter, bickering, and self-absorbed. Aboard this Literature Express is a Georgian author whose love for the wife of his own Polish translator seems as doomed as his hopes for international success; worse still, it seems all the novelists congregated on The Literature Express intend to write their next books about their time on the train... Can our Georgian author compete? Is there any hope for contemporary literature, or, barring that, at least his own little love affair? "The Literature Express" is a riotous parable about the state of literary culture, the European Union, and our own petty ambitions--be they professional or amorous.

In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval fairytale burns with an icy passion as the narrator switches roles along with familial relationships. The quasi-metaphysical lucidity with which he pursues his odd fate is eerie, particularly in light of his apparent innocence as to the perverse nature of his taboo attachments, and the theatrical artifice with which he pursues them. In the end, his passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?

Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"